uh oh, it turns out the sincerity is the point of all this

shoot.

Okay. I am writing this May review at the beginning/middle of July truthfully because I am exhausted. But exhausted and pensive, thankfully. I did a lot I was excited about this May — mostly, I listened to a ton of podcast episodes, which I enjoyed. A lot of May (and June) has been the rediscovery of what I am actually interested in, and there is something a little scary about that. I wrote a little about it in my journal on June 25 (I took out some filler words and added some clarifying punctuation):

“[For this month’s nitwit,] I want to write about uncovering the things I’m actually interested in and feeling disappointed in myself for not liking cooler stuff. […] I’m sorta scared that I will do the hard work of building and excavating myself and find at the end that I am disappointed in the result. I want to believe that I am sharp and witty and funny and nonchalant and unbothered but I think I am soft and anxious and sentimental. It’s not very cool to earnestly enjoy things. Especially when the things you’re enjoying are not all that cool in and of themselves.

[…] I think some of it makes me worry because it makes me not a straight comic. It means loving things for their humor and their sincerity, and I think in my head, the coolest thing you can be is detached. The coolest thing you can do as a comic is care only if something is funny. [Actually,] I guess this is a wholly incomplete view of comedy and more a reflection on being a cool person. I think I wish I were not laying my heart out in front of me in every interaction. I think I wish I were able to leave my heart out of some things altogether.”

I have an idea of cool in my head and the things I’m figuring out I like are incongruent with that idea. My inner middle schooler might be showing with this, but for me, it feels deeply uncool to be sincere and genuine and earnest, especially about liking something, and double especially if that thing is a podcast about the cultural implications of a historical event, or a TV show that makes you cry, or anything that isn’t high art or incisive comedy or award-winning.

WATCHED: Superstore

Superstore is kind of what sparked all of this reflection about earnestness. I started watching Superstore because I got to a point with New Girl where I made a reference to it and Gwendolyn asked what the hell I was talking about and I pulled up the exact second of the episode I was referencing. Naturally, I decided it was time for a tolerance break from New Girl, so I set out to find another sitcom to temporarily take its place. I watched a lot of 30 Rock, but it wasn’t hitting the same spot, and I couldn’t really figure out why until I started watching Superstore.

The pilot of Superstore made me think it wasn’t going to be funny at all. I thought it would just be kind of hokey kumbaya bullshit with simple, flat characters and no good jokes. I was wrong. The characters are brilliant and flawed and funny, and the episodes are well-crafted and extremely accurate to the experience of working in retail. I laughed, I gasped, I cried, etc. Superstore made me realize that the sincerity is the point. At least for me — and I don’t think this is a unique perspective — but the sincerity is what good comedy earns you. The kind of comedy that I enjoy has earnestness at its heart, and attempting to divorce those two ideas in art or in myself is counterproductive.

Superstore does a really good job balancing those two ideas — it gets a little dicey during the COVID season, like all TV of that era, but I think all in all, this is a funny, well-constructed series with well-written characters. It’s an earnest comedy, and I love it, and I’m not ashamed!

WATCHED: Anyone But You

Sydney, if you don’t find whoever bought you this bra in this size and whoop their ass from here to Sunday, I fucking will.

This movie was so much fun but was certainly bad. It’s loosely based on Much Ado About Nothing. I have many bones to pick with this movie. The two characters getting married have absolutely zero plausible queer energy or attraction between them. Sydney Sweeney needs to fistfight whoever buys her bras. Why is the dog named Klonopin? What’s Paxton from Never Have I Ever doing here? Most importantly, why the fuck do the two main characters hate each other so much, and why are they so incapable of being normal about it?

The truth is that there’s no real reason they hate each other — they had a good one-night stand that was ruined for both of them after Glen Powell’s character is upset Sydney Sweeney’s character snuck out, and she returns just in time to overhear a pejorative comment he makes to make himself feel better about it. That brings me to a larger complaint, and this is so important to me: we are literally watching the enemies-to-lovers trope get watered down right in front of our very eyes. One off-color comment or failure to follow up doesn’t make you enemies, and it certainly doesn’t make you incapable of being in the same room together. You don’t hate each other! You barely know each other! What makes enemies-to-lovers work is the tension. The history. This? This is acquaintances-to-lovers at best, and that can be found anywhere. They don’t have any onscreen chemistry. This is basically doing what AI is doing to creative writing but with the enemies-to-lovers trope. Boo.

Overall, it was a fun watch simply because it’s always fun to watch hot people be slightly messy in a beautiful location, but it’s not winning any Oscars. I’m okay with that.

LISTENED TO: You’re Wrong About

In You’re Wrong About, Sarah Marshall and Michael Hobbes go over things often mis- or incompletely remembered. (I think Michael Hobbes leaves in later seasons, but I’m still relatively early in the series.)

You’re Wrong About is exactly what I want out of a podcast. I am deeply fascinated by the events that shape history but are not necessarily taught (at least at my high school, where they inexplicably mostly taught us how to read primary sources and not really any dates or other important information). There’s something so interesting about our collective memory of events — the moments everyone watched unfold and unconsciously saved in their cultural knowledge. It’s hard to point to these in recent history because I think another element of what makes an event historical in the YWA (You’re Wrong About) sense is its staying power, but a lot of the episodes flesh out the stories of people who have been relegated to late-night punchlines and one-off sitcom jokes. Some tell stories of unfairly maligned people (Tonya Harding, Monica Lewinsky, Anna Nicole Smith, etc) while some explain the forgotten nuances of other public catastrophes (The D.C. Snipers, Terry Schiavo’s case, Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction). Still others explain exactly what was going on with Iran-Contra and the Challenger explosion. It’s not quite true crime, which I have complicated feelings about, but offers a true crime-like attention to detail and analysis of events to things like The Exxon Valdez oil spill and the 2000 election.

It’s an interesting collection of topics covered with impressive nuance and compassion. One thing that remains consistent is Marshall and Hobbes’ insistence on recognizing people’s full humanity, which can be difficult for me to reckon with as a person who is so prone to black-and-white thinking. The truth is that people who commit murders or destroy evidence or look the other way at injustices are complicated people with complicated reasons for acting the way they do. This is an uncomfortable truth to face for me, and I’m sure for many, but one thing I like about YWA is how unflinching it is in that belief. The denial of justice and humanity to those we believe to be guilty hurts everyone, and sanctifying victims similarly denies their humanity. It makes me uncomfortable to acknowledge that Monica Lewinsky was sorta aggressive in pursuing Clinton, or that Jeffrey Dahmer did not seem to have any social support, because those are obviously not the most important parts of those stories. But, ultimately, I think forfeiting nuance for clarity does not work in understanding history. It’s important to acknowledge the ways that many of the bad things people do are situational and environmental, and that there’s no innate good in us or evil in them that makes us better than them. This is as true as the facts that Monica was taken advantage of and that Dahmer committed crimes that are horrific beyond imagination. I particularly like YWA because of how much practice the show gives me in holding multiple truths together without needing to use one to negate the other.

Some episodes I’ve enjoyed: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment Parts 1 and 2, The Obesity Epidemic, Kitty Genovese and “Bystander Apathy”, Their entire series on the OJ case and his marriage with Nicole Brown Simpson, “A Dingo’s Got My Baby”, Elián Gonzalez.

LISTENED TO: Maintenance Phase

~I am going to talk about diet culture and fatphobia and my body in this section, so if that’s not your jam then I will see you in the next list item <3~

I listened to this podcast at the recommendation of one of my funniest smartest hottest friends, Emily Green. In her words, “Maintenance Phase is a good (and funny) podcast that is anti-fatphobic and centers around debunking health and diet industry scams and bad science.” Also in her words: “wow an informative health podcast that doesn’t make me feel…terrible???”

I have to agree. Maintenance Phase has begun to undo some of the damage diet culture has done to my brain and self-esteem. Previously, the possibility that I could someday lose weight outweighed any kind of acceptance of what my body is now. I had a greater allegiance to a hypothetical future skinny version of myself than I did to myself as I am right now. I felt like I had to have that allegiance, or I was just lazy and unwilling to put in the work. It felt like a moral failing to betray hypothetical skinnier Charlotte like that.

In each episode of Maintenance Phase, they take you through a health/diet myth and explain why it doesn’t work. In a lot of the episodes, they end up taking down a lot of things that shaped my understanding of diet and exercise in some way. The Biggest Loser. The President’s Physical Fitness Test. Weight Watchers. I learned a lot — diets overwhelmingly fail. Shame doesn’t actually increase your ability to lose weight. A lot of what causes people to be fat is genetic. Drastic, sustainable weight loss is not as accessible as the diet industry wants you to believe. By debunking the pillars of my self-hatred, Maintenance Phase made me accept that it’s not gonna be possible for me to change my body in the way I’ve been imagining. It’s just not. I’m not going to be able to fundamentally change my body because that’s not really possible.

To be larger, especially as a woman and especially as a Black woman, is to exist in shame. Being released from that shame has really changed the way that I relate to my body. My body will grow and change because I will grow and change, but the idea of dramatic weight loss is not in the cards for most people. Accepting that it’s not in the cards for me either has freed me not only from having to change my body but also from having to feel guilty about not wanting to try that hard for it.

It’s not that I didn’t know all of this before — diet culture is horrible and ineffective. Fat people face immense discrimination. There’s a whole industry based on shaming fat people for existing. Fatness is constantly demonized despite not being an individual issue. People spend thousands in search of a body that many of them will never achieve, not through lack of effort or lack of want or any fault of their own, but simply because our bodies are not built to lose weight. Evolutionarily, weight loss doesn’t even really make a ton of sense. I knew all of this — but there’s something illuminating about hearing in such specific terms, case by case, argument by argument, just how wrong our collective understanding of fatness is. There’s something extremely freeing about letting hypothetical skinnier Charlotte go and allowing her implicit taunting to leave with her. It leaves much more room for actual real-life Charlotte and her wants and needs.

Some episodes I’ve enjoyed: The Twinkie Defense, Oprah Winfrey and the “Wagon of Fat”, Oprah v. Beef Parts 1 and 2, Ozempic.

READ: Make the Bread, Buy the Butter

This was an interesting (and quick) read! The author Jennifer Reese went on a quest to figure out what things are better bought and better homemade.

This entry is mostly a fun way of telling everyone that I started growing basil and using it to make pesto. It’s delicious and it makes me very happy. When I have enough pesto, I usually bring a caprese sandwich for lunch every day until the pesto is gone. My journey to cook for myself more is not new, but this book gave me a lot of ideas for things I’d never even thought to make at home — ginger ale, bagels, pita pockets. I’m excited to try more recipes, and hopefully I will have enough basil for a harvest soon.

What if I don’t know who I am anymore / and what happens if I don’t like her?

I guess if I were writing this on time (at the end of May), I would write something about my hopes for June, but since June is already over, I’m just going to say that I’m going to spend July making space for the parts of myself that are less blasé and cool and ironically detached. Hopefully I’ll return to you sincere and proud.

In earnest,

Charlotte